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ASHEVILLE, North Carolina: Barack Obama's White House campaign hammered Republican John McCain Sunday for wanting to "turn the page" on the US economic crisis and engage in low-blow personal attacks a month away from election day.
The Democrat hit back with a new television spot after McCain's running mate Sarah Palin accused Obama of consorting with "terrorists," in an attack on his ties in Chicago to former anti-Vietnam war militant William Ayers.
Obama, campaigning here before the second presidential debate on Tuesday, was also accusing McCain of planning to deprive 20 million more workers of their employer-funded health insurance at a time of mounting job losses.
McCain, who was preparing for the debate near his ranch in Arizona, is down in the polls including in some all-important states, and is retooling his message ahead of the November 4 vote to portray Obama as unfit to lead.
The new Obama ad featured footage of a shuttered factory, a panicked financial trading floor and a family struggling to make ends meet.
It juxtaposed those images with remarks from top McCain adviser Greg Strimple, who said the campaign was "looking forward to turning a page on this financial crisis" and attacking Obama's "aggressively liberal record".
"Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy," the ad's narrator said.
"No wonder his campaign's announced a plan to 'turn a page on the financial crisis' - distract with dishonest, dishonorable assaults against Barack Obama," it said, closing with an image of McCain with President George W. Bush.
"Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy - and we can't afford another president who's this out of touch."
After Congress approved a 700-billion-dollar financial bailout plan last week, the McCain campaign hopes to refocus attention away from the reeling economy and back to Obama's comparative inexperience and liberal associates.
Alaska Governor Palin, at two campaign stops in Colorado and California Saturday, raised the Ayers connection after a New York Times report on the professor of education and former member of a group of 1960s radicals.
That group, the Weathermen, carried out a series of bombings on the Pentagon and other government buildings. The Times report backed up Obama's assertions that he is only loosely connected to Ayers in the Chicago milieu.
But Palin accused the Illinois senator of "palling around with terrorists" and said the Democrat was therefore "not a man who sees America as you and I do, as the greatest force for good in the world".
Obama aides called the one-term governor's remarks "shameless," and said the Democrat would never go down to the kinds of "Swift Boat" attacks that helped to sink 2004 nominee John Kerry's campaign against Bush.
Republican attacks portray Ayers as part of a shadowy network of Chicago backers that includes convicted fraudster Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a property tycoon who used to be a top fundraiser for Obama.
It is also unlikely that voters have heard the last about Obama's fiery former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who exploded into the campaign with videotaped sermons urging his parishioners to sing "God damn America".
But the Obama campaign said it would not be distracted from voters' anxieties as crisis sweeps through Wall Street and Main Street - and it has the polling numbers to back up its confidence.
Based on current polls in the state-by-state battle, the website RealClearPolitics estimates that Obama has 264 Electoral College votes to 163 for McCain. That leaves the Democrat just six votes short of victory.
- AFP/yt
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